Smiles brightened up the faces of more than 2,000 inhabitants of a remote hamlet in Colonelganj tehsil of Uttar Pradesh’s Gonda district as their village got road connectivity on Thursday. These Vantangiya people, belonging to one of UP’s most backward tribes, thanked chief minister Yogi Adityanath for making their 75-year-old dream come true.
“It’s a big day for us. It is also an emotional day as many of our ancestors are not alive to witness this historic moment when our village got road connectivity, perhaps the first major development work to be carried out in our village. We have been waiting for this day for the last 75 years. We are thankful to UP chief minister Yogi Adityanath and the Gonda district magistrate for treating us as humans and for bringing development to our small village,” said Dhaniram, the head of Ramgarh village who couldn’t control his emotions.
Feeling connected
People from Ramgarh village said the construction of the road gave them direct connectivity to the Colonelganj town area 18 kilometres away. “Initially there was no road connectivity to the village, which falls under the Tikri forest range. The village is 18 km from the town area, and with no road connectivity, covering this stretch was no less than a struggle for the villagers,” said Shivram, another resident of the village.
No road connectivity, people said, was the main reason that kept the village away from mainstream development. There were instances when locals lost their lives after failing to get timely medical aid. Due to no road connectivity, many of the youths, who had to travel to other districts or the town area to pursue their education, gave up their studies and turned into agricultural laborers.
However, now they expect their village to get connected to mainstream development. Officials with the district administration have assured that development work in the Vantangiya-inhabited Ramgarh village is on at a war footing. “Recently we were approached by the villagers demanding a connecting road. It was no less than a shocker for me too. On visiting Ramgarh, a remote village in Gonda’s Nawabganj development block, I found it to be true. I discovered that the village inhabited by the backward Vantangiya tribe was far off from mainstream development. And so I immediately ordered the construction of the connecting road,” said Neha Sharma, district magistrate, Gonda.
She said it was found that the construction of the road got stuck over jurisdiction issues as the village falls under the forest area. However, the district administration, after obtaining NOCs and completing other formalities, started the work. “With all formalities done, the construction of the road is being carried out on a war footing,” said Sharma.
Schools on the way
She said that the connecting road was not the lone issue the village was grappling with. There was also no school facility. “Responding to the issue, we have prepared a proposal for the construction of two schools in the village, with a total outlay of around Rs 35 lakh each, and have forwarded it to the UP government for the final nod. Once the permission is granted, the construction work of the schools would start,” Sharma added.
She also assured that other than Ramgarh, similar development works would also be carried out in other Vantangiya-inhabited villages in the Gonda district.
What’s happening in other districts
Gonda is not the only district in UP where Vantangiya settlements are now on the road towards development. The tribe’s colonies in Maharajganj witnessed a lot of upliftment. In Maharajganj, the UP government clubbed tribal settlements in the Sohagi Barwa wildlife sanctuary with adjacent villages to declare as many as 42 formerly secluded and remote forest-dwelling tribal settlements in the tiger reserve as ‘revenue villages’ in 2022. It further introduced the tribal folks to mainstream development with pucca houses, solar panels, Anganwadi centres, schools, and other basic amenities.
Prior to this, UP chief minister Yogi Adityanath in 2017 declared as many as five villages—Jangal Tinkoniya, Khale Tola, Aambagh, Rajahayi, and Chilbilva—where people from the Vantangiya tribe have been residing since 1922, as revenue villages, paving the way for them to receive benefits of government schemes. Gorakhpur’s perhaps had the first set of villages to get this status.
Development for Vantangiyas a priority
Soon after taking over as UP CM in 2017, Yogi Adityanath while declaring the development work in the tribal areas, especially the Vantangiya-inhabited parts, among his top priorities, had chalked out a detailed policy in a phase-wise manner to achieve this.
As per official records, so far more than 65 villages in districts including Lakhimpur, Balrampur, Bahraich, Gorakhpur, Mirzapur, Sonbhadra, Lalitpur, Maharajganj, Chitrakoot, Chandauli, Gonda, Saharanpur, and Bijnor have got the status of revenue villages.
And with this recognition, the Vantangiyas became eligible to get approach roads, potable water, healthcare, livelihood opportunities, BPL cards, employment guarantee projects, education, electricity connections, pensions, loans, and permanent housing, as well as voting rights.
Who are the Vantangiyas?
Professor PK Ghosh, a faculty with the department of medieval and modern history at the University of Lucknow, says Vantangiyas trace their history to the early 1900s when they were brought to eastern UP by the British to carry out forestation on the government land.
“During British rule, natural forests were cleared on a large scale to make way for railway tracks. They decided to develop a forested region in its place based on the Tangiya method–a farming system practised in the mountains of Myanmar. For this purpose, a large number of labourers were brought to the forest. And later they were called ‘Vantangiyas’– ‘van’ means forest while ‘tangiya’ is derived from the word ‘tongya’, where ‘tong’ means mountain and ‘ya’ means agricultural field,” he said.
Ghosh said the ‘Tangiya’ system was introduced in Uttar Pradesh and Uttarakhand between 1920 and 1923. In those times, the Vantangiyas were not paid for their services by the British and instead would be allocated small pieces of land for survival. And over the years, when the forest areas got developed and the importance of Vantangiyas dipped, the forest department tried to vacate the land, which these people opposed and it became a bone of contention between the government and the tribe.
However, the long-drawn fight eventually ended after Yogi Adityanath took over as UP chief minister and not only gave a ‘revenue village’ status to their settlements but also connected them to the mainstream.
